Yeah I notice that was weird too. The creator speaks a lot about about html optimizations but one of the most widely-used methods of page speed increases are global CDN distribution.
The SSD is really meaningless in this context. The website is so small that it will be loaded almost 100% from the filesystem cache. As long as it has more than 512 MB of ram...
If I wanted my website to load incredibly fast, I would absolutely not put it on an obscure VPS. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with it, but it's generally not going to make your site faster.
Meaningless-weaningless, but that site loaded instantly on my iphone 4-without-s and did not lag, unlike all others (except hn ofc). No CDN can hide modern js freezotrons.
Regardless of where on this globe you put your VPS, someone will be accessing it at 1000 ms latency. It doesn't make sense to optimize the browser page load speed to 10 ms, and forget that it takes 600 ms to fetch the data from Asia.
That's because all those other sites are poorly built. It's not because the article's site is a brilliant example of "doing it right".
Putting bare text on the web is always going to be fast. So what. If he presented a real full-featured website with the bells and whistles that people expect today, and made it operate that fast, he'd have something to show. Instead he presents polished garbage.
Wait - what precisely do users demand from your website today? Usually I'm happy to find a website which loads quickly, is clean, and steers me in the direction of whatever I'm trying to find, personally.
My expertise is not marketing so I don't feel I could adequately answer that question but there are plenty of focus group studies which show what sort of UX works best. It's a safe bet that most of the big corporations who are already focus-grouping everything they publish, such as Disney for example, are also using focus groups to design their websites.
They're using split testing, conversion rate optimisation, and bizdev to design their sites. When something appears on a corporate website, it's there to benefit someone in the corporation, not the users (although it might benefit them as a side effect).
His site is at least full-featured article (you can load, scroll and read it, yay). Most sites I open are article sites, and they are rarely full-featured articles, because load/scroll features aren't easily accessible.
The SSD is really meaningless in this context. The website is so small that it will be loaded almost 100% from the filesystem cache. As long as it has more than 512 MB of ram...
If I wanted my website to load incredibly fast, I would absolutely not put it on an obscure VPS. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with it, but it's generally not going to make your site faster.